Madness, Deinstitutionalization & MurderFor those of us who came of age in the 1970s, one of the most shocking aspects of the last three decades was the rise of mass public shootings: people who went into public places and murdered complete strangers. Such crimes had taken place before, such as the Texas Tower murders by Charles Whitman in 1966,1 but their rarity meant that they were shocking.

Something changed in the 1980s: these senseless mass murders started to happen with increasing frequency. People were shocked when James Huberty killed twenty-one strangers in a McDonald’s in San Ysidro, California in 1984, and Patrick Purdy murdered five children in a Stockton, California schoolyard in 1989. Now, these crimes have become background noise, unless they involve an extraordinarily high body count (such as at Virginia Tech) or a prominent victim (such as Rep. Gabrielle Giffords). Why did these crimes go from extraordinarily rare to commonplace?

For a while, it was fashionable to blame gun availability for this dramatic increase. But guns did not become more available before or during this change. Instead, federal law and many state laws became more restrictive on purchase and possession of firearms, sometimes in response to such crimes.2 Nor has the nature of the weapons available to Americans changed all that much. In 1965, Popular Science announced that Colt was selling the AR-15, a semiautomatic version of the M-16 for the civilian market.3 The Browning Hi-Power, a 9mm semiautomatic pistol with a thirteen-round magazine, was offered for sale in the United States starting in 1954,4 and advertised for civilians in both the U.S. and Canada at least as early as 1960.5 If gun availability does not explain the increase of mass public murders, what else might?

At least half of these mass murderers (as well as many other murderers) have histories of mental illness. Many have already come to the attention of the criminal justice or mental health systems before they become headlines. In the early 1980s, there were about two million chronically mentally ill people in the United States, with 93 percent living outside mental hospitals. The largest diagnosis for the chronically mentally ill is schizophrenia, which afflicts about 1 percent of the population, or about 1.5 percent of adult Americans.6 A 1991 estimate was that schizophrenia costs the United States about $65 billion annually in direct and indirect costs.7

The $19 billion in direct costs (as of 1991) included the criminal justice system dealing with a few spectacular and terrifying crimes (such as mass public shootings), and millions of infractions, arrests, and short periods of observation.8 A 1999 study found that 16.2 percent of state prison inmates, 7.4 percent of federal prison inmates, and 16.3 percent of jail inmates, were mentally ill.9 As of 2002, about 13 percent of mentally ill state prison inmates nationwide had been convicted of murder.10 A detailed examination of Indiana murder convicts found that 18 percent were diagnosed with “schizophrenia or other psychotic disorder, major depression, mania, or bipolar disorder.”11

In the 1960s, the United States embarked on an innovative approach to caring for its mentally ill: deinstitutionalization. The intentions were quite humane: move patients from long-term commitment in state mental hospitals into community-based mental health treatment. Contrary to popular perception, California Governor Ronald Reagan’s signing of the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act of 196712 was only one small part of a broad-based movement, starting in the late 1950s.13 The Kennedy Administration optimistically described how the days of long-term treatment were now past; newly-developed drugs such as chlorpromazine meant that two-thirds of the mentally ill “could be treated and released within 6 months.”14

At about the same time, two different ideas came to the forefront of American progressive thinking: that there was a right to mental health treatment, and a right to a more substantive form of due process for those who were to be committed to a mental hospital. If there was a right to mental health treatment, then judges could use the threat of releasing patients as a way to force reluctant legislatures to increase funding for treatment.15

The notion of due process for the mentally ill was not radical. American courts have been wrestling with this question from the 1840s onward.16 While perhaps not up to the exacting standards of the American Civil Liberties Union, by the end of the nineteenth century, there was something recognizably like due process before the mentally ill were committed.17 What changed in the 1960s was the result of ACLU attorneys such as Bruce J. Ennis, who claimed that less than 5 percent of mental hospital patients “are dangerous to themselves or to others” and that the rest were improperly locked up “because they are useless, unproductive, ‘odd,’ or ‘different.’”18

Until the 1960s, courts used a medical model when considering commitment: the government’s actions were part of “the historic parens patriae power, including the duty to protect ‘persons under legal disabilities to act for themselves.’ . . . The classic example of this role is when a State undertakes to act as ‘the general guardian of all infants, idiots, and lunatics.’”19 Instead, public safety alone became the legitimate basis for commitment, and with it, a more exacting standard, a bit less than is required for convicting criminal defendants.20

Neither a right to treatment nor a more demanding application of due process alone was particularly destructive, but in combination they made hundreds of thousands of seriously mentally ill people homeless,21 where many died of exposure22 and violence.23 They fell through the cracks, living shorter, more miserable lives, and often greatly degrading the quality of urban life for everyone else.24 A fraction became something quite a bit more unsettling than the mentally ill person begging on the street or disrupting the public library: they became the mad mass murderers of the modern age.

John Linley Frazier was one of the first such examples. Like many other schizophrenics, he first exhibited symptoms in his early 20s. Fixated on ecology, after a traffic accident he became convinced that God had given him a mission to rid the Earth of those who were altering the natural environment. Frazier’s mother and wife recognized how seriously ill he was, and tried to obtain treatment for him, but he refused it.

In October of 1970, Frazier warned them that “some materialists might have to die” in the coming ecological revolution. The following Monday, Frazier murdered “Dr. Victor M. Ohta, his wife, their two young sons, and the doctor’s secretary.”25 He blindfolded them, tied them up, shot each of them, and threw them into the pool. Then he burned the house to return it back to the environment. Frazier’s bizarre behavior and statements soon led to his arrest. He was found legally sane, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison.26 (The legal definition of insane is considerably narrower than the psychiatric definition of insane; it also seems that juries sometimes convict even clearly insane defendants, out of fear that they might be released after being declared “cured.”)

Patrick Purdy, a mentally ill drifter, used his Social Security Disability payments to buy guns, while having a series of run-ins with the law. After one suicide attempt in jail in 1987, a mental health evaluation concluded that he was “a danger to his health and others.”27 In January 1989, Purdy went onto a schoolyard in Stockton, California with an AK-47 rifle, murdered five children and wounded twenty-nine others, before taking his own life.28

Federal prosecutors held back for a few days from indicting Laurie Wasserman Dann in May 1988 for a series of harassing and frightening phone calls—and in those few days, she went on a rampage, killing one child in an elementary school, wounding five children and one adult, and distributing poisoned cookies and drinks to fraternities at Northwestern University. She had a history of odd behavior going back at least two years, riding the elevator in her apartment building for hours on end.29

Buford Furrow was a member of a neo-Nazi group in Washington State. Conflicts with his wife led her to take him to a mental hospital, where he threatened suicide and “shooting people at a nearby shopping mall.” He threatened nurses with a knife. At trial, he told the judge about his mental illness problems and suicidal/homicidal fantasies. The judge refused to hospitalize Furrow, sending him to jail instead. Released within a few months, Furrow went to Los Angeles in August 1999, where he acted out the fantasy that he had earlier told the court: he shot up a Jewish community center, wounding five people, and murdering an Asian-American mail carrier nearby.30

Larry Gene Ashbrook was another killer who gave plenty of warning, writing letters to local papers referring “to encounters with the CIA, psychological warfare, assaults by co-workers and being drugged by police.” Neighbors had long noticed his bizarre behavior—exposing himself in response to laughter that he thought (incorrectly) was directed at him. In September 1999, he went into a Fort Worth, Texas Baptist Church. He screamed insults about their religion, then killed seven people inside, before killing himself.31

In April 2007, David W. Logsdon of Kansas City, Missouri beat to death a neighbor, Patricia Ann Reed, and stole her late husband’s rifle. At the Ward Parkway Center Mall, he shot and killed two people at random, wounding four others.32 Only the fortuitous arrival of police, who shot Logsdon to death, prevented a larger massacre.

According to Logsdon’s sister, Logsdon had a history of mental illness and alcoholism. His family contacted police over Logsdon’s deteriorating mental condition and physical conditions in Logsdon’s home. The police took Logsdon to a mental hospital for treatment in October 2005, concerned that he was suicidal. He was released six hours later with a voucher for a cab and a list of resources to contact.

In this case, the problem was not that the law prevented Logsdon from being held. Instead, Logsdon’s early release was because of a shortage of beds in Missouri public mental hospitals. In addition, Missouri in 2003 had eliminated mental health coordinator positions in its community mental health centers as a cost-cutting measure.33

After Russell Eugene Weston Jr. shot two police officers at the U.S. Capitol in 1999, he explained to the court-appointed psychiatrist that he needed to do it because “Black Heva,” the “most deadliest disease known to mankind,” was being spread by cannibals feeding on rotting corpses. He needed to get into the Capitol “to gain access to what he called ‘the ruby satellite,’ a device he said was kept in a Senate safe.” Weston explained that the two “cannibals” he had shot to death, police officers “Jacob J. Chestnut and John M. Gibson,” were “not permanently deceased.” Weston explained that he needed access to the satellite controller so that he could turn back time.

Before this incident, Weston had been involuntarily hospitalized for fifty-three days in Montana after threatening a neighbor, but he was then released. According to Weston’s parents, he had been losing the battle with schizophrenia for two decades before he went to the Capitol.34

An employee of the Postal Service, Jennifer Sanmarco was removed from her Goleta, California workplace in 2003 because she was acting strangely, and placed on psychological disability. She moved to Milan, New Mexico, where her neighbors described her as “crazy as a loon.” “A Milan businessman said he sometimes had to pick her up and bring her inside from the cold because she would kneel down and pray, as if in a trance, for hours.” She returned to the Goleta mail sorting facility in January 2006—and murdered five employees, before taking her own life.35

When I was first writing these paragraphs in April 2007, America was mourning a tragedy at Virginia Tech, where Cho Seung-Hui murdered thirty-two students and faculty before taking his own life. His psychological problems had been evident for some months before, and he was briefly hospitalized after a stalking incident. The special judge appointed to determine whether Seung-Hui should be involuntarily committed concluded that he was a danger to himself—but allowed Seung-Hui to commit himself. The next day, Seung-Hui left the hospital, and soon he was back on campus, living in a world of paranoid schizophrenia, culminating in the largest gun mass murder in U.S. history.36

Many other spectacularly horrifying crimes followed that one. Jiverly Wong murdered thirteen people before killing himself at a Binghamton, New York immigrant-assistance center in April 2009. Letters by Wong to local news media demonstrate what “Dr. Vatsal Thakkar, assistant professor of psychiatry at NYU’s Langone Medical Center” described as “major mental illness, quite possibly paranoid schizophrenia.”37

Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was one of many people shot at a town hall meeting in Tucson in January 2011. The alleged shooter, Jared Lee Loughner, had a history of police contacts involving death threats, and was expelled from college for bizarre actions that clearly established that he was mentally ill. A series of disturbing web postings and YouTube videos also confirmed that Loughner’s grasp on reality was severely impaired.38 Court-ordered psychiatric evaluations concluded that Loughner was suffering from schizophrenia, and was incompetent to stand trial.39

Nor were these problems specific to the United States and its “gun culture” as some contend. Other nations which started down the same road toward deinstitutionalization a few years after the United States have suffered many similar mass murders.

In eastern France, Christian Dornier, thirty-one, under treatment for “nervous depression,” murdered fourteen people in three villages.40 He was later found not guilty by reason of insanity.41 Eric Borel, sixteen, murdered his family with a hammer and a baseball bat, then went on a shooting rampage in the nearby town of Cuers, France in September 1995. He killed twelve people besides himself.42 In March 2002, Richard Durn murdered eight local city officials and wounded nineteen others in Nanterre, a suburb of Paris. Durn had a master’s degree in political science and “a long history of psychological problems.” He was chronically unemployed. After his arrest, he was described as “calm but largely incoherent,” but then leaped to his death through a window.43

In April 2002, nineteen-year old Robert Steinhaeuser went into a school from which he had been expelled in Erfurt, Germany and murdered eighteen people before killing himself.44 In April 2011, Wellington Menezes de Oliveira went into a school in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil, murdering twelve children, before killing himself. His suicide note was unclear, but a police officer described de Oliveira as a “hallucinating person.”45 Later the same month, Tristan van der Vlis went into a shopping mall in Alphen aan der Rijn, the Netherlands, and shot six people to death. In spite of very strict Dutch gun licensing laws, and van der Vlis’s history of mental illness hospitalization and suicide attempts, he had a gun license.46

Along with the spectacular cases of public mass murder, there were many minor tragedies involving one-on-one murders, soon forgotten outside the family and friends of their victims. In 1983, the seventeen-year-old daughter of my landlord was murdered in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. The killer had a long history of mental problems, some of which had sent him to prison, but none of which had caused hospitalization. As so often happens, this tragedy led to another. The continuing legal battles over the killer’s sanity soon led the murder victim’s grief-stricken father to sneak a gun into the courtroom, and open fire.47

Edmund Emil Kemper III was a sexual sadist who killed his paternal grandparents at age fifteen, in an attempt to punish his mother. California hospitalized him until he was twenty-one, and then released him on parole in 1969. Over a bit less than a year, starting in May 1972, Kemper shot, stabbed, and strangled eight women, including his mother. (The rest of what he did is too horrifying to describe.) He repeatedly called the police to persuade them that he was the killer. Eventually, he was arrested, found legally sane, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison.48

Herbert William Mullin was another schizophrenic whose illness arrived just as California was deinstitutionalizing its mental patients. Until 1969, just before Mullin’s 22nd birthday, it was not obvious that he was mentally ill. Mullin was persuaded to voluntarily enter Mendocino State Hospital, on California’s north coast on March 30. Six weeks later, having refused to participate in treatment programs—and under no legal obligation to remain—he left....

The law needs to be changed where it's easier to hospitalize those young adults who have obvious mental illnesses and are in a deteriorating state. There needs to be various levels of residential treatment. Some do well in a group home setting where they are monitored for med compliance. They don't necessarily need a locked down environment.

IIRC, wasn't it Reagan who made it so that people wouldn't be long-term institutionalized? And then those people became the mentally ill walking about the streets. I forget exactly what the purpose for this was, except that I think there was abuse against people being held who shouldn't be. (But this is a fuzzy memory.)

A test of a people is how it behaves toward the old. It is easy to love children. Even tyrants and dictators make a point of being fond of children. But the affection and care for the old, the incurable, the helpless are the true gold mines of a culture.

Abraham J Heschel

Orthodoxy SUCKS.

"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them."- Galileo Galilei

Quote: steph wrote in post #2The law needs to be changed where it's easier to hospitalize those young adults who have obvious mental illnesses and are in a deteriorating state. There needs to be various levels of residential treatment. Some do well in a group home setting where they are monitored for med compliance. They don't necessarily need a locked down environment.

From my family's interactions with different levels of care I learned that group homes and independent living arrangements come at the expense of a lot of patience because the waiting lists can be so very long.

Orthodoxy SUCKS.

"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them."- Galileo Galilei

Quote: nicmarlo wrote in post #3IIRC, wasn't it Reagan who made it so that people wouldn't be long-term institutionalized? And then those people became the mentally ill walking about the streets. I forget exactly what the purpose for this was, except that I think there was abuse against people being held who shouldn't be. (But this is a fuzzy memory.)

Quote: steph wrote in post #2The law needs to be changed where it's easier to hospitalize those young adults who have obvious mental illnesses and are in a deteriorating state. There needs to be various levels of residential treatment. Some do well in a group home setting where they are monitored for med compliance. They don't necessarily need a locked down environment.

From my family's interactions with different levels of care I learned that group homes and independent living arrangements come at the expense of a lot of patience because the waiting lists can be so very long.

Yes unfortunately there aren't enough spaces. Of course when you see the abuse of billing practices by some of these agencies more help could be provided to the people who need it instead of agencies blowing funds on stupid stuff.

It would be cheaper to have mental health treatment instead of utilizing the prison system to house them after they commit a crime. If we are going t have to care for them then we should at least do it in a manner that provides their needs instead of putting them in with predators so that they are victimized over and over.

Quote: steph wrote in post #2The law needs to be changed where it's easier to hospitalize those young adults who have obvious mental illnesses and are in a deteriorating state. There needs to be various levels of residential treatment. Some do well in a group home setting where they are monitored for med compliance. They don't necessarily need a locked down environment.

From my family's interactions with different levels of care I learned that group homes and independent living arrangements come at the expense of a lot of patience because the waiting lists can be so very long.

Yes unfortunately there aren't enough spaces. Of course when you see the abuse of billing practices by some of these agencies more help could be provided to the people who need it instead of agencies blowing funds on stupid stuff.

It would be cheaper to have mental health treatment instead of utilizing the prison system to house them after they commit a crime. If we are going t have to care for them then we should at least do it in a manner that provides their needs instead of putting them in with predators so that they are victimized over and over.

I don't believe that people with mental illness get better while in prison.

It's possible that some of these mentally ill people are released because they have served their time.

Afterwards they are dumped out on the streets. It cannot be easy for them to establish mental health care while trying to get on their feet. Families do try to help them at the expense of becoming emotionally and spiritually worn out.

I believe Lanza's mother was worn out. How do I know? She had no husband to help her.

I don't know what steps she went through trying to help him. I believe with all of my heart that she probably tried and tried and tried. She simply couldn't keep up. She was human. I have empathy for her.

The stories are harder to find because the liberal press hides them. But there are some honest accounts of what families of the mentally ill go through. You have to sift through them to find the truth, though. Many of them are just written as pleas for more funding, without much compassion or reasoning.

Orthodoxy SUCKS.

"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them."- Galileo Galilei